SEATTLE—”You know you’re in a sandal factory, right?” Luna Sandals founder “Barefoot” Ted McDonald said in a small retail room on a recent sunny day. The room is covered in photos of himself jogging, hiking, and exploring various exotic locales, and from there, he led me around the corner to a modest assembly and boxing room. At that time, the shop had no other customers, which I noticed because McDonald was moving around indoors by gliding on an electric, one-wheeled apparatus known as the SoloWheel.

McDonald has become a bug-eyed advocate—and official salesperson—for the device, and he made a point to ride it around as we talked, presumably to prove just how nimble and precise his motion can be on such hardware. It was effective—he could whip around and stop on a dime in impressive fashion—but in cities like Seattle, however, such advocacy isn’t even so necessary. The single-wheeled devices, with no handles and two tiny flaps to stand on, have already started to become fixtures in hilly tech cities where people are buying into their efficient, glide-next-to-pedestrians style of movement.

Where McDonald comes in is to encourage people to buy the models designed and manufactured by SoloWheel inventor and patent holder Shane Chen, as opposed to ”around 150 knockoffs from Beijing,” as McDonald described them. His sales pitch wasn’t timid. This is a man who is obsessed with human motion, seemingly born from his experience as a marathon jogger (some of his stories were chronicled in the athletic-freaks-of-nature nonfiction book Born To Run), and his sales pitch vacillated from its technology and its efficiency to how it emulates the “runner’s high” feeling he is obsessed with.

The world is largely colorless because the in-game developers couldn’t agree on what color to make anything. Seriously.

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There are surprisingly few video games about the process of making video games. Critically acclaimed movies like Argo and The Artist dramatize the work of Hollywood. Authors often love nothing more than writing about the struggles of fictional authors. But games have been slow to take that self-referential look at their own creation.

This is slowly beginning to change. In recent years, we’ve seen titles like Hack ‘n’ Slash and Code Hero turn the tedium and minutiae of computer programming into an actual game mechanic. We’ve also seen Game Dev Tycoon and Game Dev Story look at the making of games through a light-hearted business lens. The Magic Circle takes a bit from both camps, telling a fictional story of a troubled game’s development from within that troubled, fictional game itself.

Even writing about The Magic Circle requires getting incredibly meta from the get-go. The game you play, The Magic Circle, is presented as the alpha, test version of “The Magic Circle,” a massively multiplayer fantasy world that’s been in development for over a decade by the time you get to it. The game-within-a-game is in incredibly rough shape, despite the development time, full of blocky, colorless graphics, placeholders where epic quests should go, animations controlled like puppets by human guides, and “puzzles” that are an insult to the name.

After a quick ten-minute trip through that alpha world, you dive in again in “Pro” mode and start to learn how the game-within-the-game got to this sorry state. The “live testbed” world you play in is overseen by members of the development team, who take the form of giant, unblinking eyes that float through the world and observe your actions. They’re omnipotent gods here, but they’re also flawed and fractured human beings in the real world, evidenced by the sounds of them squabbling through headsets while they monitor the test.

The pilot of the drone shot down Sunday evening over a Kentucky property has now come forward with video provided to Ars, seemingly showing that the drone wasn’t nearly as close as the property owner made it out to be. However, the federal legal standard for how far into the air a person’s private property extends remains in dispute.

According to the telemetry provided by David Boggs, the drone pilot, his aircraft was only in flight for barely two minutes before it was shot down. The data also shows that it was well over 200 feet above the ground before the fatal shots fired by William Merideth.

Boggs told Ars that this was the maiden voyage of his DJI Phantom 3, and that his intentions were not to snoop on anyone—his aim was simply to fly over a vacationing friend’s property, a few doors away from Merideth’s property in Hillview, Kentucky, south of Louisville.

It’s hard to imagine a game as defiantly old-fashioned as Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse being released without the help of crowdfunding. While it bears the sharp high-definition visuals and steep production values of a modern game, you could just as easily imagine playing it under a veil of blocky pixels and low-fi voice acting. Most publishers wouldn’t even give it a chance. Today’s adventure game is less point-and-click, and more interactive story; the challenge of esoteric, abstract-thinking puzzles dumbed down in favour of a more accessible narrative.

This isn’t always a bad thing of course: just look at the likes of Telltale Games’ brilliant The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. But the Kickstarter successes of Broken Sword 5and Double Fine Adventure in 2012 showed that there’s a small, but dedicated group out there that crave the challenging puzzles and quirky dialogue of a late-’80s and early-’90s adventure game. It’s thanks to the likes of Kickstarter, Apple’s App Store, and the openness of the PC platform, that these games can find a home.

For Charles Cecil MBE, famed developer and creator of the Broken Sword series, it was specifically Kickstarter and Apple’s App Store that were the catalyst for reviving his company Revolution Software. iOS remasters of classic point-and-click games like Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword sold well on the App Store, and set the company on a path towards its Kickstarter success with Broken Sword 5, a game that brought in nearly $800,000 (£500,000) and attracted over 14,000 backers.

Mt. Gox head Mark Karpelès was arrested by Japanese police on Saturday, more than a year after the exchange folded amidst the loss of 650,000 bitcoins. Karpelès hasn’t been formally charged but ”police are alleging that he manipulated the company’s computer system to inflate its assets,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

“Japanese media aired footage of Mr. Karpelès being led by police officers from his apartment before 7 a.m. Saturday,” the Journal report said. “An official familiar with the investigation said authorities allege that Mr. Karpelès manipulated the balance of a company account and used it to counter orders from customers. Some of the coins that he said were lost may not have existed, the official said.”

NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of “every single successful computer intrusion” by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. More than 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period.

The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed “intelligence source,” who said the briefing “highlighted China’s interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems… [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated,” the network reported.

The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the “exploitations and attacks,” NBC reported.

Windows 8 was the first Windows to include a Store, along with a pair of new apps: Music and Video. While those apps had some nice features, they were both designed for the hard sell, better suited to being storefronts than media players.

Windows 8.1 shook up the store and included brand new Music and Video apps. Store features weren’t gone, but they were no longer the priority.

Windows 10 shakes up the store again. The Music and Video apps have shed the Xbox branding that they used in Windows 8 and are now “Groove Music” and “Movies and TV.” If we thought the effort to sell was a little too overwhelming in the Windows 8 apps, the Windows 10 ones swing too far in the other direction.

After giving the world’s gay community quite possibly its most iconic studly-man image in decades, the Russian government has since gone on a legislative and regulatory tear against all things gay. This week, the controversial “gay propaganda” bill that President Vladimir Putin signed into law in 2013 was linked to an apparent effort by a Russian agency to discover pro-gay communications on social networks, especially those that include emoji and emoticons with same-sex kisses and family images with two dads or two moms.

The Russian-newspaper story was reported in the United States by Vocativ on Wednesday. It explained that the country’s Roskomnadzor media-watchdog agency reached out to a pro-government youth activism group, known as Young Guard of United Russia, and asked its members to essentially snitch on anybody whose social media posts broke the country’s Article 6.13.1 law, which forbids, among other things, “propaganda of homosexuality among minors.”

According to the original Russian report, the uncovered letter sent to this activism group by Roskomnadzor Deputy Head Konstantin Vladimirovich Marchenko contained specific guidances about emoji on Facebook, along with his concerns that “most” social media users are minors—even though a cursory glance at not-so-concrete surveys reveals that most Russian social media users are not minors and are therefore not under the purview of the law in question. We, like Vocativ, also wonder whether Marchenko’s request made any mention of the eggplant emoji in this regard.

Ars is looking to hire a tech reviewer and gadgetologist to join our butt-kicking gadget review team. Perks of the job include being able to argue about Android in-person with Ron Amadeo, hear wisdom from Andrew Cunningham’s Reviews Cat, touch Peter Bright’s glorious beard, and maybe even down some Soylent shots with me in a well-ventilated location. We need someone who’s sharp, tech-savvy, personable, and who doesn’t mind appearing on camera, since you’re going to see a lot more video on Ars in the near future.

There are two catches: first, this is not an entry-level job. We need someone who’s been in the reviewing game before, at least a bit, and we need to see some writing samples. Second: you have to be in the New York City area, no exceptions.

The discovery that it was possible to isolate graphene, a single-atom thick sheet of carbon, has opened the door to the development of a variety of atomically thin materials, many with distinctive properties. But developing devices using these 2D materials is challenging. A lot of the traditional techniques for manipulating their behavior either don’t work or require that the 2D material be linked to bulkier, three-dimensional hardware.

Now, some researchers may have taken a tiny step toward developing a device that’s entirely one atom thick. They’ve managed to create a key electrical junction, used in devices like diodes and transistors, from two different 2D materials. The border between these materials is atomically sharp, and the sheets themselves are only a few hundred picometers deep.

The device in question is called a p-n junction. It’s formed at the boundary between (wait for it) p-type semiconductors and n-type semiconductors. The p-type tends to have “holes” that are missing an electron, while the n-type is characterized by an excess of electrons. Normally, these are formed by “doping,” or adding small numbers of other atoms to a crystal of silicon. They’re key components of diodes, transistors, LEDs, and photovoltaic cells, so being able to produce them is critical to pretty much all of modern electronics.